As 2025 came to an end, we reflected on different aspects of our year, such as our music choices. Thankfully, we had Spotify’s annual “Wrapped” to help us review all of our musical personalities from the last year.
According to an Instagram story poll, 46/84 VBCPS high school students believed that their Spotify Wrapped was accurate, while the other 45% disagreed. I agree with the 38 students who noticed some inaccuracy. My first question about this year’s Wrapped was, “When do they begin and end tracking music stats for the year?” I was not at all satisfied with my top artists or songs. My top artists this year were the exact same as last year; SZA, Taylor Swift, Frank Ocean, Drake, and Tyler, The Creator. Now, I love all these artists, but there’s no way my music didn’t develop or change at all this past year. I feel like I was in a softer, alternative, sad song era. For example, I have been blasting Faye Webster’s entire discography the past few months. How did she not make my top five artists, songs, or albums? It just doesn’t sound right. I don’t recall being too much into Taylor Swift this year, especially since I wasn’t a big fan of her newest album.
While I wasn’t the most satisfied with my top artists or even my top song, I noticed some cool features within this year’s Wrapped. One of my favorite things about Spotify is its creativity and engagement with users; every year, there’s some thing different about the Wrapped. This year, they included the Spotify Wrapped Party feature. When you run this “party”, you can collaborate with friends by sending them a link. Once you join and start the party, the app analyzes each party members’ annual musical choices and gives out rewards like “listened to the most explicit music”. I thought this was an interesting way to continue to further explore the music, rather than just the usual statistics, you could connect with your friends and family through this feature. The Wrapped Party also gave a compatibility score for party members based on their music choices throughout the year.
A couple of other new features I appreciated were the predicted listening age and top song quiz. Based on your musical statistics from the year, the algorithm assigned you an age based on your listening for the year. Apparently, I’m 21 years old. I’ve seen a large range of people’s ages, and some PA students even landed in the 60s. This was definitely a funny addition to this year’s edition of Spotify Wrapped. The top song quiz was also a riveting inclusion, as it showed your top five songs and asked which you believed was your top song of the year. I guessed wrong and got a little humbled by Spotify’s, “failure builds character” comment.
I also noticed this year that we weren’t offered as many artist messages. Last year, artists from your top 10 would send artist messages, videos thanking you for listening to their music. However, this year, I only got artist messages from my top five artists. Unfortunately for me, only one of those five artists submitted a message to Spotify, which was a bit of a letdown. I remember last year getting at least five messages, multiple from artists who did not make it into my top five statistics.
The artist race was another impressive addition and reminded me a lot of a trend on social media. In this part of the Wrapped, the user’s top five artists were shown in bubbles “racing” to the finish line, with statistics showing trends the user had with playing that artist’s music. For example, as my top artists raced, I saw stats saying I had a 13 day streak of streaming SZA’s music in February or a six day streak of streaming her discography in May.
One thing Spotify loves to do is put users into a specialized music group they created. In 2023, I was put into the “collector” group, meaning that my music taste was sublime and I only listened to my own playlists. This year, I’m in the “Cloud State Society” and my role in the group is a curator. According to Spotify, this means that I’m a focused playlist creator. As you can see, I love a good playlist, afterall, I have 118 of them.
As I’m a big fan of playlists, I really hope next year Spotify adds a feature that can analyze a user’s top playlist. I would love to know, out of my many playlists, which one I frequent most.
Lastly, Spotify never ceases to amaze us with one extra feature we never knew we needed. This year, they provided users with “secret” files that reveal some stats like “biggest listening day” or “most nostalgic day”. Each file also provides a report specific to the user about that particular day. For example, my biggest music listening day was July 7, where I listened to Taylor Swift, Mitski, and Billie Eilish overnight followed by Doja Cat and Drake in the afternoon. I was so surprised and impressed with this because it’s fascinating how they’re able to deeply analyze this data this well. This was by far my favorite part about this year’s Wrapped.
Despite a couple of minor faults, I was very in awe with what Spotify pulled out of their bag of tricks this year. With their eye-catching graphics and extremely detailed, personalized features they’ve absolutely won me over; I can’t wait to see what next year has in store.
